Slashdot Mirror
First Intel Yonah Laptop Announced
Lam1969 writes "IDG News Service reports NEC will release its first laptop based on Intel's Yonah dual-core processor in the first quarter of 2006, for just under $2,000. According to AnandTech, Yonah performance is comparable to AMD Athlon 64 X2, and is more efficient than the AMD chip in terms of power consumption."
From Apple after MacWorld San Francisco
What is clear is that even when AMD had the superior product, it didn't gain massive market share. So same shit different day. At the end all the oems flock to the company that can mass manufacture.
What about the memory controller, are they adding the power consumption of that to the CPU - to be properly compared to the integrated system that AMD X2 uses ?.
A dual-core laptop processor sounds overkill. For me a laptop is merely a shell terminal to log-in to some other box.
Anyway, good to see Intel go back to the original P3 designs with all this. P4 really sucks totally - hyperthreading or no hyperthreading.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
So when are these available on desktop machines? It's gonna be hard to pitch buying a laptop instead of a workstation to the IT manager.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I wonder about the small monitor, RAM and XP Home though. I guess you have to make some compromises to keep the $$$$ down.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Come one guys. I sure wouldn't be flaunting the it consumes less power then the AMD X2 spec too much. You are compairing a "MOBILE" CPU core against a "DESKTOP" CPU core. The only reason Anandtech used the AMD X2 as the benchmark and not the mobile Turion CPU is because the dual core Turion CPU's are not out yet, so comparing the performance of the Yonah dual core system against a single core just didn't make sense. Its like saying that a cellphone CPU uses less power then a laptop CPU.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Many people don't want PC Towers of any size anymore, they'd rather have a notebook. Just like they don't want CRT montiors vs. LCD. Or normal CRT TVs vs. Plasma. Etcetera. For many reasons - aesthetics. It's easier to move (Americans move an average of every 7 years). It takes up less space, for a cramped apartment or just to dispose of (something Europeans think a lot about in both cases).
Thus, the notebook isn't a on-the-go computer anymore (Why pay for 2 computer systems anyway if you aren't a gamer, etcetera.) It's the main computer. This is reinforced by the fact that notebook sales exceeded PC sales for the first time this year.
BTW, dual-cores aren't only handy for rendering. They are handy for responsiveness, it's most obvious when a process hogs the CPU and makes everything else slow to a crawl - including but not only when trying to kill said process if it turns into a zombie. On a dual-core, that's not a problem.
That reasoning only works if you assume that someone only buys a PC immediately after moving. Otherwise the next move is likely to be less than seven years away.
Not to mention that Yonah is a 65 nanonmeter part and doesn't offer 64 bit extensions. If you are looking at a laptop in the 2006 timeframe I'd strongly consider waiting for either the 2nd gen 65 nm Intel part (I forget the core name) or the 65 nm Turion dual core due later in 2006. Both will be seriously better than Yonah.
I'm bad. I was thinking of the current powerbooks actually since I would be buying a laptop.
:-)
but hell if Apple is dumb enough to price the low end macs with the hot fast chip then I will buy one dammit!
I don't need dual core but it would be nice. My guess is apple would disable one of the cores for their I-lines.
http://saveie6.com/
"Can anyone tell me applications of dual core for a on-the-go computer?"
Running any multitasking OS (such as Windows).
Take this for instance. The NEC machine is 2000, with 512Mb, 100 Gig, 14 inch screen, and the other bells a whistles n would expect. The only real weakness is that it priced with XP toy, so it will cost $150 to get the pro version. Why anyone would sell a $2000 machine with XP home is beyond me.
OTOH, a current mac with similar specs is also $2000. When Apple moves to intel, we can assume that they will stay with these similar specs and similar price. Therefore we can expect to get a Mac, possible with a bigger screen, but smaller hard disk, not to mention built in Airport, for the same money. To make matters better, the extra $150 goes a long way to putting 1 gig RAM in slot A, which leaves the other slot free for an additional gig. And of course lets not forget that XCode and WebObjects are now free.
I am sure we will see Dell undercut the price with tricks such as rebates and the XP Home maneuver, but in the end list prices for the MS Window machines are sure to continue to be higher.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Let me lay it out for you: this is a desktop system that supports the Pentium M (Dothan). It has a 220W power supply, while my 8-year old Pentium 2 450MHz system has a 200W PSU. With that 220W and a 2GHz Pentium M, you could also run a 160GB 7200RPM hard drive, a Geforce 7800GT and an optical drive. Now imagine taking that to the next level; the Yonah is the basically a dual-core version of the Dothan. How many laptop CPUs can power a desktop workstation with half the energy requirements? Not many.
Anand's comparison is not only valid, but timely. CPU performance alone doesn't matter today, in an age when the video card can cost twice as much as the CPU. It's efficiency, instructions per cycle or per watt, that counts in the long run. This paves the way for smaller and more mobile computers, supercomputing clusters with a fraction of their current size and operating costs. The brute force megahertz wars ended years ago; Motorola/Freescale, IBM and now Intel realize this. Reducing the first room-sized digital computers to desktop towers was a revolution; in twenty years, as this power efficiency focus continues, it will happen again.
I agree with you. When I had a dual 2GHz G5, I would periodically notice that the fans would slowly ramp up to full speed. I could open a terminal and notice that one of the processes had gone postal and was at 100% on one of the processors. All the other processes landed on the other processor, and my responsiveness remained quite good -- honestly the fans were the indicator, not a decrease in responsiveness. I could then kill the offending process and get confirmation as the fans ramped down again. That beast of a machine really acted like a workhorse.
The slow ramp up / ramp down of the fans made the machine feel massive, huge, like those dump trucks taller than my house. Of course, they were governed by the thermal profile of the chips which didn't change instantaneously, but the feel was easy to misunderstand. I digress.
Dual cores are there for a variety of reasons -- rendering, multithreaded video games, any process that wants to eat an entire processor, etc. Honestly, when there are twice as many cores to accept my mouse and keyboard interrupts, the whole machine feels snappier. And it's not just for one of those, all the benefits are always there. The dual 2GHz G5 was the most responsive machine I had since my IBM R6k quad 200MHz 604.
Now if a modern OS could provide disc drive priorities, I'd be very happy. I'd like to be able to renice my virus scanner so it only gets to read a sector when the hard drive is already there because an interactive process requested it. As is, it gets the same priority as things I need to use to get my job done.
When Adobe releases a 64-bit version of Photoshop (which will supposedly happen with the next release), then we'll see a lot of things happen.
Right now, the only things that *most* pc users don't have any apps that can take advantage of the 64-bitness, aside from the extra registers that you get when you run in 64-bit mode. However, Photoshop lives and dies on memory size, and there are a LOT of people that already buy 3 or 4 gigs of memory for Photoshop right now, and will happily buy more when they can actually use it - and since you're talking about people that already drop several grand on the computer, nearly another grand on Photoshop, and often thousands more on related scanning and printing equipment, manufacturers are more likely to take their needs into consideration than someone who blows $90 on a printer and $60 on a video game.
Yes, I know, Adobe talks about improved memory usage on a 64-bit OS, but that's because of the OS' memory advantages, not Photoshop's. CS2 is still a 32-bit application, and even on a 64-bit OS, can't use more than about 3 gigs. Look in up on Adobe's site.
Not that I'd have the money for it, but 8 or 16 gigs of RAM would let me work on some of my 200+ megapixel, images (16-bit colors, not 8-bit) with a useful number of history and cache states, even if I used a few layers. If that much memory seems excessive, 200 million pixels, 6 bytes/pixel, that's 1.2 gigabytes just to hold a single image in memory. Add that much more for each layer, and then throw in history and cache states.
Now, back to the topic at hand... I don't imagine that many people will deck out their laptop with 4+ gigs of memory.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Microsoft licenses based on how many processors, not how many cores there are. So even though we are talking about a dual-core CPU, it's still a single CPU and Windows XP home will support it.
Windows XP Pro would support two dual core chips(these days), and would support two quad core processors as well. XP Home should in theory support a single quad core processor.
The Microsoft official stance is that they will not penalize the enthusiasts who want to use the high end parts.